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Reality returns in waves, each more painful and – more importantly – annoying than the other.
Loki opens his eyes, then shuts them again, but can still feel the too-bright overhead light through his eyelids.
He knows he is going to need to open them again soon, because he has no idea where he is.
The surface he is lying on feels strange, soft, but lumpy and it’s sticking to his bare skin – why is he naked? He shifts in place minutely. No, not naked, just some sort of weird garment that leaves his backside exposed, adding further to the mystery.
The mix of smells in the air is so intensive it makes his nose prickle, but he cannot recognize a single one of them, all equally strange and alien.
There are noises around, scratching, and wheezing, and buzzing, and squeaking, and then footsteps, and above that all – a murmur of speech, that makes very little sense even when sifted through the filter of the All-Speak. The tone and melody of the language seem familiar though – one of the Midgardian dialects.
So, Midgard. Huh.
He opens his eyes again then and looks around, squinting. It’s a sizeable hall, with two rows of narrow cots lining each of the longer walls. Everything is white, the walls, the sheets on the beds, even the exposed girders under the high roof are whitewashed. The women, pottering around between the beds are all wearing knee-long, white gowns too, with matching bonnets.
It’s all awfully bland.
There are machines, placed next to some of the cots, some pumping, some buzzing, some just standing there and Loki cannot recognize a function of even a single one. It’s no wonder, it’s been a while since he’s visited the realm the last time and mortals’ technology – while still laughably primitive – is developing quickly.
Some of the other beds are occupied, by people in white garments – which seems to be the rule – some coughing, some sleeping, some laying around with their limbs or heads or chests covered in bandages.
A healing facility, must be.
Still, it doesn’t explain anything. The last thing Loki remembers is traveling through the eastern continent of Vanaheimr with Thor and their friends and getting ambushed by a group of highland robbers. A fight that looked boring and unchallenging, until that Kronan showed up and Loki cast a quick spell to take them out of there before it got too tedious. Which, well, left him a bit distracted and earned him a bash with the Kronan’s club, the effects of which he can still feel in the dull ache in his shoulder.
He stifles a dejected grunt. It’s been a while since he messed a spell that badly. He hopes at least the rest of the group made it back home without getting thrown all across the Nine on the branches of the Yggdrasil. Still, even if they did, Thor and the rest will never let him hear the end of it.
He still isn’t sure about how exactly he ended up where he is, but that’s not that important, and the tedium of being stuck in some mortal infirmary overwhelms his desire to know exactly how it happened. That, and his head is throbbing and the aches in his shoulder are slowly getting too severe for him to happily ignore it.
He moves his hands to form a spell. Or at least tries to, because his injured arm refuses to cooperate and a sharp stab of pain travels from his fingertips, up to his shoulder and spills over his chest. He looks down. His entire right arm is encased in some sort of splint, reaching up to his shoulder and being held in place by a length of bandage wrapped around his chest. It’s been applied with care and the side touching his skin is soft, so he quickly decides it’s not meant as a restraint, but rather as a healing aid, one mortals would need, with their ridiculously slow regenerative factors. Midgardians still remain blissfully ignorant of the existence of life outside of their own backwater planet, so it’s no wonder they assumed Loki would need it.
He grinds his teeth and sends a spark of magic to explore.
His clavicle and humerus bones are broken, just like a couple of his ribs, and the swelling is significant. He finds no internal bleeding though, so it shouldn’t be that hard to fix. Still, it’s better left till he gets home. Hand gestures are just a way to make casting easier and he can do it without moving his arm if he focuses.
Which turns out rather hard, with all the unfamiliar noises, smells and the throbbing ache in his skull. He might want to remove himself to some more private area first.
He opens his eyes. And comes face to face with a man. The mortal – white-clad, just like the women, even though the style of his garment is a bit different – smiles at Loki under his wide-framed spectacles, then shines a light into Loki’s eyes.
“Stop it!” Loki warns and squeezes his eyes shut.
“It’s okay,” the man says, and his words come through somewhat muffled, making Loki realize there’s a bandage wrapped around his head too. “I just want to examine you. Whatever hit you, hit you hard.”
A decision quickly forms inside Loki’s brain. It’s just a small hindrance and Father won’t take it too kindly if Loki causes another mess on Midgard. It’s best to play along for now and sneak out the moment the mortal drops his scrutiny.
He huffs and opens his eyes, then allows the man to shine the annoying light into his eyes.
“Hmm,” the mortal murmurs and removes the torch, then pulls out some sort of apparatus from his pocket, places the two earpieces in his ears, and wiggles the flat, metal circle on the other end under Loki’s garment and applies it to Loki’s chest, while pressing his fingers to his wrist, just below a port that’s been installed in Loki’s arm, which Loki notices with slight alarm. There’s a tube connecting it to a bag of clear liquid on a stand nearby. “Huh,” the mortal mumbles.
That’s all Loki can take. “What?”
“Your heartrate is significantly elevated. It might mean nothing serious, but we have to keep…”
“It’s normal,” Loki says, cutting him off, then adds, seeing the mortal’s undecided face. “For me.”
The mortal murmurs something under his breath and picks up a pad, until now attached to the foot of the bed, then writes something down on it. Then he frowns. “It’s missing your name,” he says and looks at Loki questioningly.
It takes Loki a heartbeat to understand the mortal is waiting for him to fill the gap. “Isaac,” Loki blurts out the first Midgardian name that comes to his mind.
The mortal makes a gesture, urging him to go on, then – when Loki doesn’t follow up – says, “And the last name?”
Loki frowns at him, not sure what he’s being asked about.
The mortal’s face draws in and he notes something else on the pad, then circles around the bed, pulls a round, metal stool closer and sits down. He produces another pad – smaller this time – from his pocket.
“Do you know what day it is today?” he asks.
Loki purses his lips.
“What year?”
Loki does a couple of quick mental calculations, raking his mind for information on the Midgardian style of time measurement and conversion rates between the realms. “Nineteen… thirty… five,” he says finally, trying to make it sound like a decisive answer and not a wild guess, which it is.
The mortal hums again and notes something down, while Loki fights an urge to groan in frustration.
“Do you know what hospital you’re in?”
Loki grits his teeth.
“What city?”
That’s simply unfair.
“What country?”
Oh, come on!
The mortal sighs and folds the pad back into his pocket. “It’s not uncommon to experience amnesia after head injury. It usually passes in a matter of hours or days, so it might be nothing to worry about. We’ll still keep you for the observation and run more tests. Do you have any questions?”
Not of the sort you can answer, Loki thinks and shakes his head yet again.
The mortal wanders away to approach some other patient and Loki waits till he’s a couple of beds away before he turns his scrutiny to the tube stuck in his vein. It doesn’t seem too securely attached, there are no pins on implants, just a length of tape, but it still proves rather problematic when Loki has only one usable hand.
In the end, he wraps the tube around the rail on the side of the bed to keep it in place and yanks it free.
“Hey!” one of the women yells and runs to him. She grabs his arm and starts wiping the blood now slowly seeping from the opening the tube left with a piece of gauze. “What do you think you’re doing?!”
And with that, Loki finally has enough. “I’m grateful for your hospitality, but it’s time for me to go home.”
“You can’t. Not yet. The doctor needs to see to it first,” she says. She’s still holding his arm.
“Let go of me,” he says, calmly, but there’s still a note of warning in his tone. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if you force me.”
She removes her hand and raises her arms in surrender, then takes a step back. “Doctor Montgomery! I need assistance!” she calls out.
Not minding her yelling – or the commotion that starts to create around him – Loki scrambles out of the bed. The ridiculous gown leaves him utterly exposed and makes him miss his armor dearly, but trying to find out what the mortals did with it is not a priority right now. He can order a new set of armor made once he’s home.
He makes it almost to the exit when two men appear, blocking the door.
“Get out of my way,” he says.
They don’t. The taller, bulkier one tries to grab Loki’s arm, but he twists out of the way. The other one tries as well, but Loki ducks under the man's arm and dashes for the door.
There’s a long, narrow corridor on the other side of the door. At first glance there’s nothing to indicate which way leads outside, so Loki picks a direction at random and runs with it.
There are shouts behind him, urging him to calm down and come back, but he disregards it. Then there are more people. Some are wearing the same white uniform as the doctor before, some a different kind of attire – dark blue coats and weird angular hats. Those are carrying weapons that might be clubs, perhaps. Loki swerves to the offshoot of the corridor to avoid them, then turns the corner.
There’s a wall blocking his way.
Loki swears, the nastiest Vanir slur he can think of, and turns around. The pursuers are closing in, blocking the way and Loki scrambles for an opening and finds none. He doesn’t want to fight the mortals, but it looks like they are not going to give him another choice.
He identifies the weakest point in the lineup of people – a short, stocky man – then launches at him. His shoulder screams in pain and it covers his vision in dark spots when he collides with the mortal. The impact is enough to bring the man down, but the distraction is enough to make Loki stagger. He collapses to one knee.
The others jump on him.
The first attacker Loki knocks away with a blast of power – that he can still do with only one arm functional – the second gets a punch in the chin, but there’re simply too many of them and Loki is now fighting from the losing position, on the floor and with no weapon.
It takes them a while and there are many mortals left unconscious – or perhaps dead, because it doesn’t take that much to kill a mortal – but they overwhelm him finally, multiple hands pinning him to the ground, while he’s hissing and struggling.
Then there’s a sharp jab in his neck and the world wavers and dissolves to nothing.
---
He is in a different room. This one is smaller and there’s only a single bed in it, the same that he is now strapped down to, with cuffs on his left wrist and on both ankles and belts running across his knees, hips, stomach and chest.
The headache is much worse now, his head pulsing with every beat of his heart and threatening to burst and the bones in his shoulder hurt like they’re on fire, which is not at all helped by the fact that his right arm is now pinned to his chest by some new bandages and the straps.
But that’s still not the worst part.
His mind feels clouded and his vision is swimming and he finds it hard to focus his eyes. There’s a new tube in his arm and the skin around it is prickling, as more of the poison drains into his vein.
He knows he needs to do something about it, anything, but his entire body feels heavy and uncooperative and he can barely keep his eyes open. His magic feels sluggish too, as he sends it coursing through his body, trying to fight the poison. As if the drug dripping to his bloodstream was interfering with it somehow…
He shakes his head to rouse himself back to alertness and tries again, this time trying to heal at least some of the damage, but he makes just a little progress before his focus slips. Perhaps he should’ve started with that before…
But no, he must’ve assumed that he can talk his way out of this. How many times does that have to fail for him to learn?
The door opens, with a piercing screech of metal grating over metal and the mortal doctor steps in. “I didn’t expect you to wake up for at least a couple more hours with the amount of tranquilizer we needed to bring you down. You metabolism seems to be off the charts, but we’re adjusting the dosage accordingly.”
“What is the meaning of this?!” Loki demands and tugs at the straps, which turns out to be a mistake the moment his bones shift and send a sharp reminder not to be careless.
The man just shakes his head. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to stay here until we’re sure you’re no longer a danger to others. I’m afraid there might be some brain damage that causes…”
“I’ll show you who's left with brain damage once I’m done with you,” Loki snarls and his voice is low and vicious enough to make the mortal take a panicked step backward. Loki smiles, baring his teeth. “That’s right, run, this might be your only chance.”
He takes a sharp breath and yanks his left hand. The fabric cuff snaps. The doctor stumbles out, yelling something. Loki fumbles the belt holding his chest open, then moves down.
He’s almost done freeing his feet when the enforcers are back.
It takes a lot less this time, before he’s back on the ground, another dose of the drug is administered into his neck and the reality slips away.
---
The new room is even barer than the previous one. There’s nothing in it, really, just padding on the walls, on the ceiling and on the floor, extending even over the door, leaving just a small slot at the bottom and a slightly bigger, barred window closer to the top.
The light is dim, just a single fixture in the middle of the ceiling, a bare bulb in a metal cage, and Loki is thankful for that, because even that prickles in his eyes.
His shoulder still hurts, even though the broken bones seem to have healed somewhat while he was out. Which is for the best, because now his arms are wrapped around his torso tightly and secured behind his back. There’re also straps, cinching his waist and running between his legs, across his cheeks, under his chin and over his forehead, that make any movement, including turning his head problematic. A strip of leather is pressing down his lips, with small holes to let the air through, that’s also buckled somewhere behind his head, safely out of his reach.
That, along with the straps around his knees and ankles, reduce his mobility to rolling on the ground.
Still, it’s the eerie emptiness in his head that scares him the most. He can feel his body working out the poison, little by little, but there’s still enough of it left to interfere with his magic and make focusing on anything seem like a hopeless endeavor. Was the mortal drug designed to work on him like that or was it just a side-effect?
It doesn’t matter. He just needs to wait it out, cajole the mortals if he has to, convince them he’s not a threat. And then, when he’s free, he can have his revenge.
---
He doesn’t get a chance.
Two of the men who come to the room a while later don’t listen to his words – the strap muffles them and makes them slurry, but doesn’t make speech impossible, which leads to the assumption that it’s there to prevent Loki from using his teeth as the last resort – and hold him in place, while the third empties another syringe into his bloodstream.
This one doesn’t make him pass out, although the world obtains a fuzzy quality that he can’t blink away no matter how hard he tries. Then he just lies there, curled into a fetal position, staring numbly at the wall, until he drifts away.
---
The men – and some women, too – come and go. The doctor is there sometimes, but Loki can barely hear him through the mist that clouds his mind. There are other people, some in white – other doctors, perhaps – some in dark suits. They ask him questions that he rarely knows how to answer and even more rarely has a will to do so.
He is taken out of the room a couple of times, to be placed in front of machines that make his skin prickle from radiation, or to be strapped down onto a table and have a series of cables connected to him and make electricity run through his body, or to tie him to a chair and force a tube down his throat when he refuses to eat, or to bring him to a wet room to hose him down. Then they drug him with one more dose of poison and take him back to the padded room.
He calls out to Heimdallr, once or twice, but his calls remain unanswered, and Loki cannot be sure if it’s because his voice alone without a push of magic behind is not enough to attract the Watcher’s attention, or if there are others, more important matters that he needs to attend to other than looking Loki’s way.
No, they don’t know, Loki tells himself.
Thor would come if he knew. He will come. Loki just needs to be patient. Loki has wandered away from Asgard countless times before, sometimes without telling anyone, but he always came back. Give it enough time and Thor will know something has happened. Then he will come.
---
The days pass in a blur, and – between the tests and the bland, padded cell and the constant song of poison in his veins – Loki loses count.
Thor doesn’t come.
---
There’re new people here. Scientists, they call themselves, working for the government, they say, although Loki doesn’t know which government it is and doesn’t really care. They shave his head and place a crown on wires on his naked skull then hook him to a machine and tell him to do his magic.
He tells them he can’t, but they do not listen, not until his voice is gone from screaming.
One day, they strap him to a table again and prod their needles into him. When he wakes up, he’s still on the table and the soft, vulnerable flesh of his abdomen has been cut open, and the sight of his exposed guts makes him gag. Then he screams, until they put him back to sleep.
---
The scar on his stomach throbs dully for a couple of days before it heals.
They do it again once it does.
And again.
And again.
---
The trickle of “scientists” coming to put their sharp instruments in him thins out. The doctors leave not long after.
The people who are left – those who come to strap him to a chair for feeding or hose him down – are whispering about a war, but Loki doesn’t know what war it is, who’s fighting who or about what.
He remembers, distantly, from his history lessons that mortals were always fond of warring among themselves and that it would bring them to their doom, eventually.
From Loki’s perspective, it cannot come soon enough.
---
The war is won – they say it’s thanks to him and the serum they’ve made out of all the blood they drew from his veins – and the scientists return. With them, come their machines, now with more blinking lights and knobs and buttons than before, and the dance starts anew.
They break his bones and scrap his marrow from them. It’s going to save lives, they say. Loki doesn’t know much about that.
It didn’t save his, after all.
---
They come to take him away one day – or night, Loki has no way to tell – and take him out of the padded room and into a vehicle. He wakes a couple of times through the ride, but the blindfold they put on his eyes back in the room stays on and he doesn’t get to see the sun, after all.
The new room they take him to is different – different enough to offer a few days of entertainment, as he catalogs every scratch on the wall – but also similar. The padding is replaced with hard concrete and a thin sleeping mat in the corner, and the straightjacket is replaced with heavy chains binding his limbs and linking a cumbersome collar they lock on his neck with his wrists and ankles.
There’s a mechanical eye of a camera in a niche in the ceiling and a toilet with a sink that he’s allowed to use. At least till he rips the pipe from the wall and slices through his throat with its sharp edge, right above the collar.
When he wakes up again, his throat is bandaged, the collar is linked to the center of the floor by a few feet of chain, and the sink is gone, just sealed nubs of the pipes sticking out of the wall left where it once was.
---
They talk freely around him now, their words exchanged above his head while he sits or lies there, strapped to one apparatus or another, as if he couldn’t hear them. As if it didn’t matter.
It does not, Loki supposes.
Someone important gets shot, then there’s another war and suddenly there’s not, and the mortals’ faces change and grow older and get replaced with new ones, until he stops paying any attention. There’s an infinite supply of humans, it seems, and they all appear as eager as their predecessors to inflict damage. The methods change, but it’s just more of the same.
The pain never stops.
Each time Loki hopes they are done, that there’s nothing more they can take from him, nothing more they can rip away and use for themselves, they bring forth new things, new machines, new ways to make him hurt.
Every moment of his miserable existence is recorded now, and he can sometimes glimpse the images on their screens as he is brought for a new round of tests and experiments. There’s nothing recognizable about the gaunt, ruined wreck that stares back at him from those screens.
---
He thinks about home sometimes, although it gets harder and harder to recall the faces of his family and friends.
Loki knows that one day they will be gone for good and he’ll be left with nothing.
---
The change is gradual, but it’s there. The facility grows emptier and the pauses between the tests take longer and longer. There’s a device sealed to his forearm now, that administers the drug automatically, so no one needs to come to his cell to do that anymore and sometimes it’s days – weeks maybe – that he can go by without seeing another living being.
Then they stop coming altogether.
The single light in Loki’s cell goes out one day and never comes back.
The drug runs out after some time too and so, Loki can think clearly for the first time in what feels like forever.
It’s a short-lived relief. Where the drug numbed his body along with his mind, he can now feel every ache, every badly healed scar or cracked bone. And hunger – he cannot even remember when was the last time that he was fed.
The last one turns to be the worst of them all and he finds himself wishing for the feeding tube, now.
Some time passes, and he can no longer crawl to the toilet, just lies there, curled into a ball.
It shouldn’t take long, now.
---
There are voices in the darkness and, for a while, Loki’s wondering if he’s imagining things again. Then the voices get closer and the cell door opens. A wobbly beam of light dances on the walls and rests on Loki. It hurts to look at it, but he doesn’t close his eyes. It’s been too long.
“Oh, gods…” a woman’s voice exclaims, then there are steps, approaching. “Tony, there’s someone in here.” She keeps her voice low and it sounds soothing after all the silence.
The beam moves from his face and the woman kneels next to him and gently places her hand on his shoulder. Then she gasps and stares at him, for a long while. Loki wants to turn away, abashed, but he does not. He isn’t even sure if the woman is really here or if it’s just the last vision his brain serves him as it’s turning off.
“Tony!” the woman calls again.
A man in shining metal armor steps in, the light in his chest bathing the cell in a soft, blue glow. He comes over and crouches next to the woman, then studies Loki’s face with a frown.
Loki wants to say something, but he isn’t sure he can, his mouth is dry and his throat clenched, so he does not. Whoever those people are, they will soon find their use for him, he’s sure.
“Are you…” the man starts, gets up, and takes a step away. “No way.”
“Beats me too,” the woman says.
The man presses his fingers to his ear. “Howl, get your sexy ass over here. You’ve gotta see this.”
A moment passes, and there’s a flash of green light in the hallway. One more person comes into the cell, their face highlighted by an orb of green light hovering just above their palm and Loki forgets how breathing works. He knows this face. How could he not? It used to be his own.
There’s a moment of silence, before that other Loki speaks. “It looks like I fucked up that spell on Vanaheimr even more than I thought.”
After all this time, it all finally clicks into place and Loki starts laughing.
---
The laugh turns into a coughing fit and it takes Loki a while to control it. The woman stays by his side all the time, her hand still on his arm, and Loki wants it to stay there. It’s novel, for a touch to not be something used to hurt him.
The other Loki’s eyes dash away from his face each time he meets the gaze and Loki’s suddenly aware of how it must look, to see himself like that.
“Loki?” the man in the armor – Tony – says and then chuckles, as both him and the other Loki look up. “We’ll have to figure some sort of a naming system,” he says lightly, then points at the shackles while looking at the other Loki. “Can you?”
The shackles open with a quick spell and the energy that tingles on Loki’s skin feels so familiar it makes his mind reel.
---
They take him to their vessel then. He’s too weak to walk, too weak to even sit up on his own, so Tony carries him. They pass through a yard and Loki gets a chance to take one deep breath of the crisp night air, before the vessel’s door closes behind them.
They set him down in one of the seats and the woman brings him a bottle of water, then holds it up for him to drink until it’s all gone. Then she brings another and something she says is food, even if it doesn’t look like it. Then she feeds him pieces of it, soft and sweet and it’s so delicious it makes his eyes water.
The vehicle engine turns on and the ship – because it turns out to be a ship – raises off the ground and up in the air and the realization sinks in.
He’s getting away from that place, one way or another.
---
Loki drifts off into a half-dream. He can still hear the engines and the soft voices as the other Loki and the others talk between themselves, but his mind is elsewhere, drifting among the stars, towards home.
There’s a noise nearby and he startles.
The other Loki is sitting in the seat next to his and is now looking at him, and – despite it being Loki’s face – he cannot recognize the expression on it.
“You’ll have to kill me,” Loki says. “That’s the law.”
Loki knows it, so the other Loki knows it too.
"Or you'd have to kill me," the other Loki says, as if that was a valid option. “I’m done playing by Asgard’s rules.” He sighs. “We will talk about it later. You should rest now. It’s a long flight back home.”
Then there are fingers on his temple and Loki sleeps.
---
The next time he wakes up, he is in bed. An actual bed, with a soft mattress and satin covers that feel like a liquid under Loki’s fingers.
The room is spacious and – while Loki doesn’t recognize the style – the design communicates comfort and luxury. One of the walls is created by a row of windows and there’s a sun rising up in the sky beyond them and Loki stares at it until there are dark spots in his vision.
The other Loki sits in a high armchair under one of the windows, his legs crossed. He seems absorbed in running his fingers over the screen of some sort of device in his hand. His hair is longer than Loki ever remembers having, falling to his shoulders in a mess of lazy curls – he must’ve given up trying to keep it straight at some point. The clothes he’s wearing are Midgardian in fashion, but still fit him well, as if he belonged here. He looks healthy. Content.
Everything Loki’s not.
Loki turns his eyes down to his own hands, bony and scarred, with bloody bruises left by the shackles standing out against the deathly pale skin. He sights.
The other Loki turns his gaze up. He puts the device away and comes over to sit on the edge of the bed. “How are you feeling?” he asks. Loki hasn’t noticed before, but there’s a lilt to the way he speaks, something that wasn’t there when they were the same person. Or perhaps it just comes from hearing his own voice coming from someone else.
“Fine,” Loki says.
The other Loki smiles. “You don’t get to lie to me. I’m you.”
Loki sighs. “How long…” he starts, but cannot get the rest of the sentence out, his throat suddenly squeezing shut.
“Eighty years. Midgardian. That’s…”
“A hundred and twenty.”
The other Loki nods.
There’s a moment of silence.
“You said we’re going home,” Loki says, gazing outside, over the Midgardian city.
“It is home. For me. Could be yours, too.”
“Why?”
“The All-Father Odin and I had a… heated argument. Among other things. I left Asgard behind. Now, I have a life here, one that’s not spent in someone else’s shadow. Friends, too. The real kind.”
Loki blinks.
“It’s a long story and I’ll tell it to you in detail. There’s a lot of things about us you need to learn too. But that’s for later. You should heal first. Get better. Then we can discuss everything.”
“What about Thor?”
The other Loki smiles knowingly. “We had our beefs, but we get along these days. He is the king of Asgard now. He comes over sometimes.”
“And Fa… Odin?”
“He lives, that’s all I know.”
“And Mother?”
The other Loki purses his lips and looks away, then shakes his head.
Loki’s chest tightens and his hands curl into fists as he’s fighting the tears.
“It’s okay,” the other Loki says. “I know how it feels to find out. It’s okay to cry. I cried too.”
Loki looks at him and, for the first time, can see how he could’ve become that man. “It’s so… surreal.”
The other Loki chuckles. “This is our luck, isn’t it? One in-a-billion freak magical occurrence and it has to happen to us.”
The sigh that comes next is perfectly synchronized. The other Loki laughs and it sounds cheerful and sincere.
There’s a knock on the door.
“Come in,” the other Loki calls, the door opens, and Tony steps inside. He is carrying a tray.
“I brought food,” he says, placing the tray on the bed, then leans in and kisses the other Loki, his hand wandering up to the nape of the other Loki’s neck. He pulls away and smirks. “I would complain how you use me as your private butler, but you know how I love your weird powerplays. Also, hi,” he adds and waves at Loki. “We really need to do something about the name business.”
“Later,” the other Loki says.
“Have you considered Mini-me?” the man asks with a grin.
“Get lost, Stark,” the other Loki says with pretended annoyance.
Tony’s hand brushes on the other Loki’s shoulder in passing as he’s leaving the room. He stops halfway to the door and turns back to them. “On a scale of zero to ten, how do you estimate the chance of a threesome?”
“Out!” the other Loki snarls, pointing at the door. Tony sniggers and leaves.
Loki watches the scene with a mixture of amazement and dread.
“It’s fine, here on Midgard. No one minds. Well, almost no one, but you can ignore the idiots.”
“But he’s… a mortal.”
The other Loki shrugs. “And also the smartest, kindest person I know. True, his sense of humor is questionable at best and his sense of style simply left and never returned. Also, he’s taken. That’s the only thing I’m not willing to compromise upon. And the threesome thing was a joke. Although considering how Romanoff’s looking at me sometimes you could probably hit it off with her. Or end with a knife in your groin, possibly. It’s hard to tell with her sometimes. The chances are pretty much fifty-fifty.”
Loki has only the vaguest notion of what the other Loki’s talking about, but it’s not what important. “I don’t get how you can treat it so…”
“Lightly?”
Loki nods.
“It is what it is. Yes, I got scared at first. Old instincts fired and I had no idea what to do. Then I talked to Tony. Do you want to know what he said?" He pauses and brushes his hair away from his face in a studied motion that Loki’s sure took many repetitions in front of a mirror to perfect. "Why am I even asking, of course you do," he says and a small, benevolent smile quirks the corners of his lips up. “Shit happens. That’s a quote. So, in other words, there’s no way to predict the outcome of everything we do, so sometimes when the impossible does happen, all you can do is go with the flow. There’s no ultimate universal balance that’s offset. People are born and die every day. That day on Vanaheimr… One of us was born. I’m not even going to try to guess which one it is, because it doesn’t matter. We might have started as the same person, but you’re you and I am me and there’s a place for both of us in the universe. Because, why not?”
Loki doesn’t know what to say to that. It’s weird and awkward and against everything he’s been taught about the principles of magic, but maybe… Maybe that’s not a bad thing. It’s certainly easy to believe that, as he looks at the man before him, living in exile on Midgard and seemingly better off in every regard than Loki has ever been.
He looks at that talkative, relaxed, happy version of himself and cannot help but think that maybe it could be him too, one day.
“I’m sorry,” Loki says.
“For what?”
“For messing up that spell.”
“I messed it up too, remember?” the other Loki laughs, then curls his hand into a fist and bumps Loki’s shoulder. “Stark’s right, by the way. We need to do something about the name situation.”
---
He eats the food Tony brought and the other Loki helps him wash up and dress.
“I literally saw everything there is to see,” he brushes off when Loki protests, then follows him into the bathroom.
There’s a situation when the water starts running and a wave of unwanted memories smashes into him, but the other Loki stays close and tells him to breathe, until he does and it passes. And, when he dresses, the clothes are hanging on him like on a scarecrow.
Still, when he lies in the enormous, soft bed again, he starts to remember how it feels to be a person.
It feels good.
---
It takes him days to get used to a rhythm. A rhythm of waking up and seeing the sun rising over the city. A rhythm of regular meals, that grow more and more elaborate and usually don’t end before Tony made sure Loki cannot fit absolutely anything else in. A rhythm of having people talk to him and not above his head, addressing him with anything but strings of insults and threats.
When he feels well enough they start going outside. The deck on the top of Tony’s massive tower first, then the streets and the park in the city below.
The mortal city – New York, it’s called, and Loki idly wonders what happened to the original York – is much different than anything he remembers seeing on the Realm before. There are more vehicles, more people, more lights and sounds and smells and it all feels alien and overwhelming and… wonderful. Nobody knows who he is, here and it’s easy to get lost in the crowd and forget, if just for a brief while.
When he grows tired of the tumult of the streets, they go to the park – a patch of greenery squeezed between the towers of glass and concrete and steel that scratch the sky. They sit down on one of the benches or just directly on the grass if the weather is nice and the other Loki – they still haven’t decided who’s ought to keep the name – gets them ice-cream or hot-dogs or some other Midgardian food and Loki learns he likes most of it. It’s different than what he remembers from Asgard, but not worse, he decides, on the same day he discovers mint ice-cream with chocolate chips.
One day, when he watches the other Loki order tacos from a parked vehicle, he realizes why he sounds so different, too. Underneath the All-Speak, the other Loki is speaking the mortal language now, as if it was his own.
Perhaps it is, for him.
When the weather is bad – and it often is, since it’s the turn of the seasons – they stay in the tower. For a while, it’s only him, the other Loki, and Tony. Then more people start showing up.
It’s Romanoff, as the other Loki calls her – or Natasha, as she asks them to be called – at first, the woman he knows from the facility. Then she brings a friend – Clint – over one day. Then two men, Steve – who looks like he could outwrestle Thor – and his friend with a metal arm – James or Bucky, depending on who’s calling. Then a shy man in glasses – Bruce – who takes a while to get going, but then spends the rest of the evening on a heated discussion about universal physics with Tony and the other Loki.
And, the more Loki observes, the more he understands why the other Loki likes it here. They listen to him when he speaks and regard his opinions as much as their own, and when they joke, the jabs are not aimed at the other Loki exclusively, and even if they are – that seems to be Tony’s specialty – it’s always in jest and never in malice.
After a while, Loki realizes he likes them all too.
That day, they’re lounging in the living room. Besides the usual residents, Natasha and Clint are here. The other Loki’s playing the piano – apparently he has learned how to during his stay here, from Tony – and it’s some melody Loki’s never heard.
It’s a very pleasant day.
Then the building shakes.
Loki curls up instinctively, with his hands above his head for protection, but no further blasts come. He gingerly lowers his arms and looks around. Nobody seems perturbed.
“I swear, if he broke even one of my windows this time, I’m going to sue him,” Tony remarks, without moving from his armchair.
Then the double doors fly open and Loki freezes.
For, in the doorway, stands Thor.
He looks exactly the same as Loki remembers, except more grand, more royal, more powerful, making Loki painfully aware of his own deficiencies. Just like always.
Thor looks around the room and his eyes land on Loki, and Loki breathes a sigh of relief. He seems to be aware of the situation, at least to some extent.
“I always said magic tricks are going to be the end of you, brother,” he says.
The music cuts off. “And, as always, the exact polar opposite of what you said was going to happen happened,” the other Loki says. “Who would’ve thought.”
Thor’s grin widens and he puts the Mjolnir down, then lunges and sweeps Loki into a bear hug, one that makes his ribs creak under pressure.
“I’m not the brother you know, Thor,” he breathes when the wave of emotions rolls over and he can think again.
Thor pulls away but still holds Loki at his arms’ length, his massive hands clasped on Loki’s shoulders. “I hope so,” he says with a grin. “One cheeky rascal is enough. Besides, you both know that I always wanted more siblings.”
---
“So, did you figure out the name thing?” Tony asks one day, during breakfast.
“No,” says Loki, at the same time as the other Loki says “yes.”
“Which is it? Yes or no?”
“Both,” the other Loki says.
“Why am I not surprised?” Tony says and rolls his eyes. “What’s the call then?”
“We’re both keeping it,” the other Loki says. “That’s our given name. For me and for Loki. You’ll have to get over it, somehow.”
Tony shakes his head in feigned exasperation. “I can live with that,” he says and Loki feels he could say the exact same thing.